


there is a love/meant for me

by lutzaussi



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Pre-Canon, Soul Bond, backstory exploration, stress cooking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-10-29 20:43:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10861737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutzaussi/pseuds/lutzaussi
Summary: Their lives are separate, until they aren't.Kakashi and Iruka realize they are soulmates in front of a bin of onions; of course.





	there is a love/meant for me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unseelieknight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unseelieknight/gifts).



Three minutes. Iruka watched the time slowly ticking down on the clock above the door as he absolutely ignored the work he was supposed to be doing. Normally he would be doing his best to get all the work possible done, but it was Friday and Anko was paying for drinks when he eventually got out of the Hokage Tower.

He’d been loaned to the Hokage because it was the time of year when the personnel files and archives were gone through to make sure they were up to date and free of errors. Since Iruka was efficient, had a near-photographic memory, and was less prone to errors than most of the other bored Chuunin shafted into helping, his assistance was invaluable. They’d already made it halfway through the archives, quicker than any year before.

That didn’t mean that it wasn’t boring as all hell. Okay, maybe a  _ little  _ interesting to see the documents that allowed the village to run, but Iruka was bored of it after half a week. He was looking forward to going out, and if Anko’s appearance a minute later was telling at all, she was looking forward to it as well.

As soon as the clock hit six Anko grabbed him and he tried, almost in vain, to shove everything in his bag as she began blabbering. God, he wanted a drink, and it was a relief when he finally had one. He felt exhausted for some reason, even though he had gotten a full night’s sleep and had done very little real physical labor that day.

-

Kakashi got back from the S-Rank mission and he was, above all, exhausted. It had been two months undercover and he didn’t want to set foot in the Land of Tea for at least a decade once he made it back to Konohagakure. Being an S-Rank, he was obligated to return his paperwork and give a preliminary report to the Hokage himself, and it was a goddamn relief when the old man, after skimming the papers and listening to his succinct summary of the time he had spent away, gave him a full month off.

Admittedly, he had to finish his actual report and submit it to the mission desk, but since the Hokage had received most of the important intel, he had a week to do that.

Freedom. Freedom and  _ relaxation _ , which was something he didn’t often get. Since he was physically fine, only a little exhausted, his first stop was his shower. To be able to get all of the grime and the weariness of the mission out of his body with nearly-boiling water was almost better than getting back.

Dinner was less satisfying; he only really had rice and whatever food had been in the freezer (old fish, better than nothing) and the fridge (pickles; everything else was bad and had been bad for at least six weeks). It made do, and he ate with the appetite that for most of his mission had been gone.

Though he would’ve liked to clean up more—leaving for two months meant his apartment would get pretty grimy, especially with all the dogs—he suddenly felt very tired and a little loopy, and after re-sheeting his bed, he went to sleep covered with his dogs.

-

Anko appeared at Iruka’s apartment for breakfast, unannounced. He accepted it, not only because he was nursing an admittedly not very bad hangover. After she had “taken him under wing” (her words, not his) he had realized that he was never going to be able to get rid of her. She did bring some really good tea, though, and it was marginally better than having to be alone.

At least, it was better, until she started complaining about how he’d been a buzzkill the night before. That earned nothing more than a wince from him; he’d ended up so tired that after only half a bottle of sake he’d nearly been asleep, and Anko had dragged him home.

“I had to leave so early,” she was whining, watching him cook with a pinched look that meant her hangover was probably worse than his. “Thank fuck I have a cabinet full of alcohol at home.”

“Sorry,” he said, not really feeling sorry as he set a plate of food in front of her, sat down to eat as well. When Iruka spoke again, through a mouthful of food, he was frowning. “I just got really tired all of a sudden. I mean, I wonder why, too.”

“Soulmate? Shit like that goes across the bond,” Anko asked, stealing some of his eggs.

Iruka shrugged. They ate in silence, and when they were done he left Anko to wash up.

There wasn’t really any purpose for them being up early; Anko had gotten back from a mission and was on leave for a couple weeks, and since it was the weekend Iruka wasn’t expected to work at the Tower or the Academy. Instead, they left his apartment with a single-minded purpose: finding an empty training ground and beating the everliving shit out of each other. Both of which were a resounding success.

For all that Anko was the prodigy of Orochimaru, she didn’t fight very dirty. Iruka did. He was still tired and felt a little achy, which didn’t make much sense, but the combination of those two led him to being a little more brutal than usual. It paid off, though. Anko still seemed to think that Iruka was an upstanding citizen (like  _ hell _ , though she hadn’t known him during his Academy years), and when he had finally dumped her on her ass for the second time in ten minutes she admitted defeat.

They laid in the quiet field, panting. The sun was high, and Iruka felt much more awake, energetic even. He smacked Anko in the shoulder, said, “You owe me dango.”

She smacked him back, “You owe  _ me _ dango.”

-

Kakashi woke up very, very late.

Well, relatively so, he supposed. He had nothing he needed to do other than clean up but it still felt wrong to wake up at eleven in the morning. A couple of the dogs were still on the bed with him, Akino in the sun probably overheating, and Pakkun on his pillow. Kakashi had somehow ended up turning completely around in his bed and vaguely remembered using Bull as a pillow, though the large dog was gone.

Despite that, and losing all of his blankets to Uuhei, who was still nested on the ground next to the bed, he had slept well. He felt good, felt ready to clean and maybe even ready to tackle the ultimate challenge: bathing the dogs.

He didn’t start off with that, though, choosing instead to stop by the market so he would have food to make up breakfast—or, really, lunch. The prospect of food was enough to rouse all of the dogs. They crowded the kitchen, and Kakashi resigned himself to stepping over and around them in order to actually make the food that he had brought back. It wasn’t a lot, he’d been hungry while shopping and had hurried.

Once the dogs were all fed and he himself had eaten, Kakashi managed to get most of the dogs out of the apartment and onto the balcony off of his living room. That left enough room for him to dust and then vacuum before displacing Pakkun and Uuhei from the couch so he could at least attempt to get the caked dog fur off.

Attempt was the key word there, but he never sat on the couch anyway.

The bathing of the canines went better than expected; they were all mostly happy to see him again, and that meant they were inclined to not pull any bullshit as he shampooed them two at a time. Drying them was the ordeal, but they all made it through alive, and only a little maimed.

Kakashi finished out the day on the floor, half-heartedly writing his report as the dogs, piled on and around him, listened to the radio. They enjoyed the show that played every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, two guys who lived in the middle of nowhere in the Land of Fire and gave people home improvement and maintenance tips. Kakashi would admit that they could get pretty hilarious, but the background noise was wrecking his concentration, and after half an hour of being stuck on the same sentence he gave up. Throwing the papers on the coffee table, he leaned back against Bull, and didn’t protest when Bisuke and Pakkun climbed onto him. He felt content, warm, and before he passed out surrounded by his dogs he blurrily remembered he needed to get more food in the morning.

-

Iruka felt warm even though he was alone in his apartment, looking through the paperwork he needed to complete before he could begin teaching at the Academy. After passing all of the testing required the month before, he was in a weird limbo state that was transitioning between being a teaching assistant and a full-fledged teacher. Hence the work at the Hokage Tower to fill up his time. He’d begun taking hours in the Mission Room, alongside the archive work.

He couldn’t complain. It was with more than a little apprehension that he had taken the steps to become a full teacher, and it was nice to have a buffer for that, at least for a couple weeks until the classes graduated and he would be in charge of his own class. The thought terrified him for a few moments.

That series of thoughts did away with any concentration he had been trying to grasp, and he set the papers away from him, stretched back and flicked the radio near the couch on so the apartment wouldn’t be silent. It wasn’t too late, but Iruka was hungry. He would need to buy more food in the morning, he mused as he made himself dinner.

-

Kakashi was ready to fight all of the grandmas at the fisherman’s stand to get some of the saury that were swiftly disappearing from in front of him. He did almost fight his way out when he finally had three of the fish in hand. The butcher’s stall was nothing compared to that, and he finally made it to the vegetables and fruits with what felt like half a cow in hand in addition to the fish.

At least the dogs would be happy, he mused as he perused the onions and potatoes. Then he paused, because his stomach—no, not just his stomach, his entire body—felt warm, felt content. It was how he had felt the day before, laying with the dogs and listening to the radio, but the feeling was intensified by a hundredfold. It felt—it felt as if he was home, safe.

Trying not to look affected (which was difficult), he looked up from the onions to find a brown-haired man looking dumbly at the onions. As Kakashi stared at him, the man looked up, flushed slightly and asked, “Do—are you…?”

“Yeah.” Kakashi didn’t really know what to say after that, because he knew what that feeling of home meant if both of them felt it.

-

Iruka didn’t rightly know what to think. They didn’t really know each other but Kakashi seemed the decent sort. Of course Iruka knew  _ about  _ him, everyone in the Land of Fire had heard of Hatake Kakashi, but nobody really  _ knew  _ him.

Iruka began getting to know him.

It was a labor. Later, months and years later, Iruka would call it a labor of love, but at that juncture of his life it was merely a labor. Fuck. He wanted to tell Anko because he more or less told Anko everything but both he and Kakashi had made the mutual decision that this was something that they didn’t yet want to share with anyone.

Well, they were going to start with dinner. He cautiously hoped it would go well.

-

So, soulmates. Bonded by destiny. Kakashi didn’t really get that; so far it had only been four dinners and Kakashi had survived all of them and made it home to tell the tale.

Well, not that he actually told anyone. The dogs were half-interested, half-ready-for-bed each time, and Kakashi was in no way going to divulge anything to them. Yet. He showered and kicked the majority of the dog toys out of the way on his way to bed after dinner number four, a rather long meal at Yakiniku Q where Kakashi had gotten Iruka to laugh four times.

Iruka was, Kakashi decided after laying down, a good person. It wasn’t so much a decision as the obvious put to words, though there was a shifty sort of edge to him that reminded Kakashi, if he ever forgot, that Iruka was a trained shinobi of Konohagakure.

Kakashi didn’t know much about that though. From what he knew from Iruka himself and the social circles Kakashi himself moved in, Iruka worked at the Academy and occasionally for the Hokage. Sometimes he took shifts in the Mission Room, but Kakashi had never encountered him there. It didn’t seem like he took many missions, and while Kakashi really wanted to know why, he also could respect that they were still getting to know each other. Iruka knew very little about him, anyway.

-

Iruka toed off his sandals, could hear the tell-tale sound of someone else moving around his apartment. More specifically, his kitchen. No cause to worry, he knew, the only person who thought it worthwhile to break into his apartment and fuck around in his kitchen was Kakashi. He stretched and went for the living room instead of finding the other man; this had almost become routine over the past couple of weeks, and more importantly he had received his class list. In the rush of work he hadn’t had a chance to look at it, and he was anxious to. There were a lot of kids entering the Academy that year and he was unsurprised when he tugged the student list out of his bag to find more than thirty names on it.

He sighed, sat on the couch, and pored over the page. Most of the names were unfamiliar. Some he knew through family association—such as the Hyuga girl, the new generation of Ino-Shika-Cho. Then, at the bottom of the list, one after the other, were the names “Uchiha Sasuke” and “Uzumaki Naruto”.

Iruka couldn’t bite back the groan. The Hokage had it in for him, somehow, because maybe he could deal with one of them, but both?

And Naruto. Objectively Iruka knew that Naruto was not the Kyubi, no matter what parents told their children, that his life had frankly been shitty, and that he was known as something of a practical joker. But he still wasn’t sure how to treat the boy, who the Fourth Hokage wanted to be known as a hero but who the larger populace refused to view as such.

Kakashi emerged from the kitchen with a tea towel over one shoulder and a scrap of paper in one hand, and before Iruka could say anything he asked, “Is there a reason you have pictures taped on the inside of the cabinet above the stove?”

“Uh,” that caught Iruka off guard, and he twisted around to look at the picture that Kakashi was holding out. He nearly snorted, because it was of him and Anko back when they had been repainting her apartment. If he was recalling correctly—“Anko taped them there. I don’t really remember, we’d been pretty drunk.”

“Why?” Kakashi asked, taking the picture back to inspect it.

Iruka shrugged. “It was when I first moved in. Said I needed more reminders of life outside work.”

“In a kitchen cupboard.”

“Yeah, Anko has a thing for drinking a lot of alcohol and then making decisions. So, I don’t really know.”

Then, though, his interest was piqued. His memories of that cupboard were fuzzy—a chef he was not, and he generally made the easiest dishes possible. He couldn’t even remember what the other pictures were.

Kakashi went back to the kitchen, and Iruka followed him. The cupboard in question was open, and Iruka was treated with a view of some very old pictures of himself, his parents, and a couple of him and various other Chuunin and some Jounin (Anko, always) mugging for the camera. He began taking them down, one by one, inspecting the people captured in each picture while Kakashi put a lid on the pot of stew he’d been working on.

Once all the pictures were down, Kakashi took a few to look at. He turned one in particular over, asked, “Your parents?”

Iruka peered at the picture. It was obviously over a decade old, because he was in it and he was tiny, perched on his mother’s flexing arm. His parents had their heads thrown back, mid-laughter when the camera had gone off. “Yeah,” he said, and his voice was quiet.

He looked up to find Kakashi staring at him, something inscrutable on his face. “When did they die?” he asked, leaning back against the counter. The way he asked it, how he said the words, told Iruka ‘you don’t have to answer, if you aren’t comfortable.’

“The Kyubi attack,” Iruka said, and despite how raw it sometimes felt even after eleven years, it didn’t hurt to tell Kakashi.

-

Dinner was quiet, and once they had eaten Kakashi pushed Iruka out of the kitchen so he could think over what he had been told in silence while washing the dishes. Iruka hadn’t talked much, but he had told Kakashi a little about his parents. Not much more than their names, and some about their lives.

It was a lot though, and it meant a lot. Kakashi had told Iruka a little about his own parents—not much, most of the history of the Hatake was public knowledge already—but Iruka was almost more secretive than he was about his past.

He finished washing the dishes, left them to dry, and started a pot of tea. Nobody would ever believe that he, Hatake Kakashi, was being this domestic, and that earned a small smile as he took the tea into the living room, where Iruka was staring at a paper. He started a little when Kakashi entered the room, afforded him a wan smile.

Kakashi perched at the other edge of the couch, and after a further five minutes of watching Iruka agonize over that same paper, he plucked it out of the other’s hands (delighting in the squeak that elicited) and turned it so he could read it. It was the list of kids going to be in Iruka’s classroom when school started, and Kakashi raised an eyebrow as he read down the list. A lot of future clan heads, a lot of big names.

Then he reached the bottom, the two orphan boys. “Uchiha and Uzumaki?” Kakashi asked, and he forced himself not to laugh as Iruka’s countenance turned a little green.

“I don’t know,” Iruka paused, took the cup of tea that Kakashi poured and shoved at him. “I don’t know how I’m going to deal with them.”

“I mean, like any of the other kids,” Kakashi said, shrugged when Iruka looked at him. “They probably haven’t had people treat them like everyone else for a while,” he eyed the last name, “or ever.”

Iruka acquiesced to that with a nod, but still looked decidedly forlorn. Kakashi internally sighed, set his own cup of tea down, and opened his arms. “Come here,” he ordered, trying to be stern. Iruka raised an eyebrow and only after Kakashi gestured with both hands did he scoot over so he was sitting directly next to Kakashi.

Kakashi enveloped him in a hug, which was awkward until it wasn’t, both of them warm and feeling at home. “You’ll do great,” Kakashi said, and he sincerely meant it. “All those kids are going to love you.” That was said with even more conviction, because Kakashi was fairly sure he was an expert at the topic of loving Umino Iruka. Or at least falling in love with him; that was happening all too easily.

-

Iruka returned home after the second full month of teaching to find Kakashi furiously cooking. He’d been on a mission for the three weeks previous and it wasn’t really a surprise to find him bandaged up and looking half-dead but still grilling fish and keeping an eye on a pan of something Iruka couldn’t identify.

He made sure to make a decent amount of noise as he put his bag down and withdrew the papers that needed grading. So far they hadn’t had any problems after missions, but Iruka knew better than to expect every time to be the same. But, it had been a while, and with Kakashi back home something in him settled.

“Academy is good?” Kakashi’s voice filtered out from the kitchen.

Iruka made a sound of assent, left the papers for later, and went to help in the kitchen. They ate in silence, and Iruka refused to be put out of the kitchen, washed the dishes while Kakashi dried. He started the kettle after he was done washing, needing fortification to get through all of the papers he needed to grade. As he did, Kakashi paused in the motion of wiping off his hands, and his visible eye narrowed. “Fuck,” he muttered, “I forgot to feed the dogs.”

“Dogs?” Iruka asked, fully turning his attention back to Kakashi. He didn’t know about any dogs.

Kakashi’s face reddened a little, and he asked, “Would you like to come?”

That’s how they wound up at what Iruka assumed was Kakashi’s apartment at nine at night, moving stealthily so his neighbors wouldn’t see them. Kakashi let them in and nearly immediately they were mobbed by at least half a dozen dogs. It was delightful, if a little overwhelming, and the apprehension that Kakashi was feeling was shared along their bond. Iruka let the delight overwhelm him, and when Kakashi looked sidelong at him, eye wide, Iruka knelt and began to introduce himself.

When Iruka finally extracted himself from the dogs it was two hours later, and he felt warm, warm, warm as he let Kakashi give him a nearly spine-crushing hug, before Iruka left for the other side of the village.

-

Kakashi was on his way back from a mission when it happened. It started as a tingling in the muscle of his back, to the right of his spine. When he paused on a wide tree branch, intending to move down to the forest floor because the trees thinned out, the tingling turned into phantom pain.

He knew the feeling; it happened whenever Iruka got hurt, and Iruka felt the same whenever Kakashi got hurt.

The pain itself wasn’t alarming, but the thought of Iruka being injured—and badly, by the amount of pain that was being communicated to Kakashi—was what truly alarmed him.

Though inclined to move faster, Kakashi kept his pace. He didn’t want to pass out before making it back to Konohagakure, and if something bad had happened there he needed to keep his strength. He had around half a day of travel before he would even see Konoha’s walls in the distance. With that, Kakashi sighed, and kept on.

He couldn’t keep going through the night. The hazy exhaustion that nearly drowned him was probably mostly from Iruka, and both of them resting would help both of them feel better. Kakashi slept sitting up, back against a tree, and as soon as the sky was beginning to lighten the next morning he awoke.

Trees flew by, and before noon hit Kakashi was at the gate of the village, again feeling exhausted. His first stop, after waving to Genma at the gate, was the Hokage Tower. The report was already done; he’d written it whenever he had a chance to rest while getting back from the Land of Water. It had been a long trip. He’d been  _ really _ bored.

Getting his paperwork authorized and a payment slip was quick, and he figured he could actually collect his payment the next day. More importantly, Kakashi needed to find Iruka.

-

Iruka was very achy. The medic-nin in charge of him had deemed it okay for him to be on his back but that didn’t stop his back from hurting like hell. Whatever was in the IV they had given him dulled that, and Iruka had belatedly realized that it was also probably messing with Kakashi, who was still on a mission. They really needed to talk about at least registering as bonded so nobody would give Iruka drugs while Kakashi was potentially in danger.

He had spent a lot of time asleep since the evening before, but when the shadow from the window fell across his legs, he jumped.

And immediately regretted it. God, that had pulled the stitches, and he fell back against the veritable pile of pillows with a grimace.

Kakashi was by his side in an instant, looking pretty good despite probably just having returned from his mission. “What sort of trouble did you get into while I was gone?” the man asked, slipping into the chair next to his bed.

A wry smile tugged Iruka’s mouth. He felt better just with Kakashi there. “Um. Naruto. You didn’t hear about it from the gate worker?”

Kakashi’s eyebrow raised, and he scooted closer, rested his hands on the bed, “What does that mean?”

“He might’ve stolen a scroll from the restricted library in the Hokage Tower,” Iruka said, inching a hand toward one of Kakashi’s. Kakashi’s eye widened, and he let out a muttered “Did  _ he  _ do this?” before Iruka injected, “No, he didn’t. That was, er, Mizuki. Fuma shuriken.”

Kakashi tensed, looking as if he wanted to go leave and find Mizuki. Iruka took his hand, squeezed it until the other man relaxed a little. “It’s fine, Ibiki has him as far as I know,” Iruka stated, matter-of-fact, as if he hadn’t just said that Mizuki (who Kakashi sort of thought as Iruka’s friend) had lodged a massive Fuma shuriken in his back. “Naruto kicked the shit out of him.”

“Naruto…? What?” Kakashi probably couldn’t look any more confused, so Iruka sighed, and started again from the beginning.

He’d just finished the entire tale when they were interrupted. The door opened, and one of the assistant medic-nin appeared, stopped stock-still when she saw Kakashi. The medic-nin looked between them, at their clasped hands, and with her eyes wide said, “I’m so sorry! I’ll come back in a little while, I’m sorry for interrupting.”

They watched her back out, and Iruka and Kakashi looked at each other. “Oops,” Iruka said, a lopsided smile on his face again. Kakashi let out a snort, squeezed his hand, and let go of Iruka’s hand.

“Come here,” he said, opening his arms. Iruka gingerly sat up, scooted forward, and let Kakashi tug him into a hug—not too tight, not so it would hurt, but close and intimate. “Please don’t do that again,” Kakashi said, probably trying to sound stern but only managing a pleading tone.

Iruka’s arms came up and he returned the hug as best he could without pulling his back. “You know I can’t,” Iruka whispered, burying his face against the crook of Kakashi’s neck. “And I know you can’t.”

They spent a few moments in silence, content to just be with each other, before Kakashi spoke again. “We should get registered,” he said, voice serious.

Iruka was the one to pull away. “Are you sure? They could use this against you.”

“But at least the hospital and the Hokage would know,” Kakashi reminded him, “they’d be able to deal with stuff like this,” he gestured to the hospital room, “better.”

It wasn’t even a moment for Iruka to say, “Yes.” He—dare he think it, though not say it yet—could easily imagine living the rest of his life with Kakashi; love was something Iruka could do easily, and though Kakashi presented a unique challenge, underneath the prickly exterior he was rather easy to love.

And even though Kakashi had been the one to suggest it, he looked surprised at Iruka’s consent. “Really?” he asked, and Iruka snorted, placed his hands on either side of Kakashi’s face so Kakashi was forced to meet his eyes.

“Yes,” Iruka said again, a small but pained smile on his face.

Kakashi hooked one finger around the top of his mask, tugged it down, and pressed a gentle kiss to Iruka’s lips. “Thank you,” he whispered, and Iruka almost felt as though his heart would beat out of his chest at how much love surrounded them.


End file.
